In a recent exposĂ© on WeWorkâs funders, The New Yorker âs Charles Duhigg offers insight into how and why this was possible. In simple, slightly reductive terms, there is a small group of (predominantly male, Ivy Leagueâeducated) people in Silicon Valley who collectively command an enormous reservoir of capital. The vast wealth of these individuals enables them to sustain great losses in pursuit of windfall returns. And the past two decades have taught them that windfalls are the only returns worth pursuing: Getting in on the ground floor of the next Amazon (or, failing that, Uber) is orders of magnitude more valuable than seeding a dozen profitable, midsize businesses. An executive at SoftBank, the investment firm of Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, summarized the ethos to Duhigg, saying, âVenture capital has become a lottery ⊠Masa is not a particularly deep thinker, but he has one strength: heâs devoted to buying more lottery tickets than anyone else.â
In this context, a âlottery ticketâ often means âa stake in an aspiring monopoly.â The route to 1,000 percent returns tends to run through a cornered market. Sometimes, the pursuit of market dominance is abetted by network effects inherent in the product. Often, it is aided by capital-rich VCs rallying behind a prospective titan, and enabling it to ruin its rivals by offering products and/or services at below break-even prices.
All enabled by stealing the intellectual property (including education, experience, privacy, and innovations) of every regular person in the industry.
Iâm really surprised this orgâs name didnât come up during all the hemming and hawing re militias.
Funded also by the Coors family.
Blech. I remember everyone going on about Coors when it wasnât obtainable east of the Rockies, then finally tasting it, and going, âEh, whatever.â
Itâs way worse:
âKYLE RITTENHOUSE IS OUT OF JAIL. God bless ALL who donated to help #FightBack raise required $2M cash bail. Special thanks to Actor Ricky Schroder @rickyshroder1 & [My Pillow CEO] Mike Lindell @realMikeLindell for putting us over the top,â Wood tweeted.
Wow.
Ricky Schroder is trying to the next Jon Voight.
Thereâs a âSilver Spoonsâ joke/meme in there somewhereâŠ
Iâm just going to pretend I didnât see that so that my childhood isnât ruined.
I think itâs usually best to view art within its own context and not that of the artistâs politics. But it is getting hard nowadays. The number of writers and actors willfully choosing to expose themselves as sexists, racists, and all-around scum, is too damn high!
A Brexit rant from a Scot:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/12/so-you-say-you-want-a-revoluti.html#more
Yeah, the Irish and Scottish questions are going to be⊠interesting.
And everybody forgets about Gibraltar.
There are already food import issues and not even from the EU. Thatâs what a lot of people donât realize: up to this point all imported products have been EU imports. Nobody really has negotiated trade agreements with the UK, they were all lumped under âEUâ.
People are going to die. Short term at the very least this has the potential to make the Thatcher years look like a cornucopia, and this is not me blunting the damage of milk-stealing Maggie, this is just the reality of how completely and utterly fucked the people of the UK are going to be.
And it didnât have to be this way.
Billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a Leave campaigner in the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum, has confirmed a new 4x4 vehicle will be built in France.
When plans to build the vehicle at Bridgend, south Wales, were first announced, Mr Ratcliffe said it was âa significant expression of confidence in British manufacturingâ.
It was hoped the factory would create up to 500 jobs, producing about 25,000 Grenadiers a year, once fully up and running.
Mr Ratcliffe, who built his fortune heading the chemicals company Ineos, added that Hambach was âa modern automotive manufacturing facility with a world-class workforceâ.
These fucking pricks!
a taste
As Cold Warâera business leaders styled themselves the true custodians of liberal democracy in the face of Soviet threats, they transformed concepts native to a democratic political tradition such as justice, equality, and citizenship into objects of professional problem-solving and efficient administration. Basic public goods like a well-rounded education or public transportation, recognizable to previous generations as critical components of functional democratic citizenship, were exhausted and transformed by the instrumentalizing ideology that astroturfed the âfree marketâ ideal into a rolling managerial takeover of almost every major institution in American life. Now weâre left with a facsimile of a facsimile: STEM curricula and the New Jersey Transit Corporation. Itâs this corporate enclosure of the public sphere thatâs permitted a grifter with the flimsiest of business credentials like Trump to overpower the public imagination.
âWhatâs good for (fill in the name of your favorite 1950s corporation*), is good for America.â
âThe business of America is business.â
And the Industrial Revolution, which pretty much was the Pandoraâs box that let loose the corporations of the future, really wasnât that long ago, was it? Gosh, thingsâre movinâ FAST 'round here!
*my favorite is Acme. I have their print catalog. 
Itâs one of the cons that still amazes me. Iâll ask people: do you go to your dentist when your car needs to be repaired? Why assume someone with the skill set for a specific type of work in one particular industry would be the right choice for an entirely different position with â in many cases â polar-opposite skills?
Yeah, I donât really have anything to add to that, except that deep space or a black hole might be better. Wouldnât want to taint the sun with that trash.
Also, itâs easier to accelerate someone to intersteller space than to decel them into the sun.